Redistricting spurs House cash dash

Veteran House members going head to head with their colleagues are locked in a fundraising arms race.

Thanks to redistricting, incumbent House members are duking it out in as many as 13 races across the country. Some of those members have been able to coast through recent elections without much effort, but taking on a fellow incumbent is a different story.

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Incumbents tend to have hefty war chests and established donor bases, so candidates who takes them on need to mount an aggressive fundraising push — and they have.

Nearly every veteran incumbent pitted against another sitting House member has raised more money this election season than this time in the last cycle, according to a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance records. The 17 lawmakers facing member vs. member races who have served more than one term have raised a total of 36 percent more than they had by this time in the 2010 cycle.

“Redistricting year brings out a new aspect of survival,” said former Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-N.Y.), who served as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. “When you have a member to member [race] … that brings out the strong incumbent factor on both sides of the equation as they garner the dough that they need to win.”

Case in point: Tom Latham, a nine-term Republican congressman from Iowa. After the state’s new congressional map merged his 4th District with that of GOP Rep. Steve King, he opted to run against eight-term Democratic Rep. Leonard Boswell in the 3rd District.

In his bid to oust Boswell, Latham has already raised $1.7 million so far this cycle and had a whopping $1.9 million cash on hand by the end of last year, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.

It’s a huge uptick from previous cycles. By the end of 2009, Latham had raised just over $560,000.

“I just have a lot of supporters,” he said when asked about his recent fundraising surge. “We’re happy to have it.” The Iowa Republican has close ties to GOP leadership and has gotten financial support from House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Boswell has also been fundraising aggressively in advance of the showdown, although he’s fallen short of Latham. Boswell raised $672,000 through the end of December — about 15 percent more than the $586,000 he’d raised by the end of 2009. He had $494,000 in the bank.